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Algeria: Obama’s Chickens Come Home to Roost

Jeremiah Wright was right after all. The Algeria jihad attack proves it.

Not long after the 9/11 jihad attacks, Barack Obama’s mentor and friend, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, preached a sermon in which he uttered the now-notorious words: “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

Wright meant, of course, that the U.S. had brought the attack upon itself by its own acts of violence against others: “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye… and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards.”

In a certain sense Wright was right: the U.S. did bring 9/11 on itself – but not in the way that he thought. The jihadists who destroyed the Twin Towers and damaged the Pentagon had not been brooding about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and no action by the U.S. did or could have justified the mass murder those jihadists perpetrated. If it could be truly said that the U.S. brought 9/11 on itself in any way, it was only by failing to recognize the implications of and to confront the ideology behind the jihad attacks that immediately preceded it.

There was an abundance of indicators of what was coming. In December 1988, an Islamic jihadist murdered 259 people, including 189 Americans, by bringing down Pam Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In February 1993, Islamic jihadists murdered six people and wounded over a thousand in their first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center towers. In June 1996, Islamic jihadists murdered nineteen people and wounded 515, including 240 Americans, in a bombing at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. In August 1998, Islamic jihadists bombed the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, murdering 291, including 12 Americans, in Nairobi, and murdering ten more and wounding 77 in Dar es Salaam. In October 2000, Islamic jihadists bombed the USS Cole in port at Aden, Yemen, murdering seventeen sailors and wounding 39.

In response to all this, the U.S. lobbed a few cruise missiles into Afghanistan and took out a chemical weapons factory (or aspirin factory, depending on one’s source) in Sudan, and did little more. No serious attempt was made to come to grips with the full nature and magnitude of the ideology that inspired those jihad attacks, and to work to neutralize its violent potential. And so it would have been more surprising if the 9/11 attacks hadn’t happened than that they did.

So it is today. Barack Obama has overseen the installation of Sharia regimes in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. While paying lip service to the importance of distinguishing jihadists from genuine democratic forces in Syria and elsewhere, the Obama administration has offered no criteria for doing this. And now al-Qaeda jihadists in Algeria have carried out a brazen assault on BP’s natural gas plant in that country, killing at least eighty-one people and demonstrating anew the falsehood of Barack Obama’s recent claim that in Afghanistan “we achieved our central goal … or have come very close to achieving our central goal, which is to de-capacitate al-Qaeda, to dismantle them, to make sure that they can’t attack us again.”